Tag: fundementalists

There is a meme that’s been floating around the interwebs for a number of years that is a screencap of a question posted to Yahoo Answers (always a fantastic place to go if you need to be reminded of what a pitiful species we humans are) where an apparently religious parent is concerned about their son or daughter turning into an atheist.

As is the problem with these sort of images, the picture has been posted, downloaded, re-posted, downloaded, re-re-posted etc etc etc to the point where the text has become almost illegible due to the fact that sites like Facebook compress each image that you upload – and every time an image like a JPG is compressed, bits of information are lost… sort of like if you took a photo and photocopied it and then photocopied that 1st photocopy and then photocopied that 2nd photocopy: each generation becomes worse than the one before it.

It’s a good little message, so before it gets to the point where the text is completely beyond human comprehension, I figured I should transcribe it here to the Omniversal Blog – with a little editorial polish: even my own articles here go through subtle revisions in the days after they go live as I re-read them and break down clunkier concepts for the sake of understanding and word flow.

Okay… here we go.

Q: What Is The Best Way To Stop Your Child From Becoming An Atheist?

A: Do not educate them, or expose them to critical thinking, logic, or science.

Lie to them constantly about how the world works. Feed them a steady diet of mumbo jumbo dressed up like real knowledge – jumbo jets are really the whirlwind, for example – and pretend that it is deep wisdom.

Make them loathe their own natural bodies and functions. Convince them that they are small and weak and worthless and in need of redemption. Tell them everything enjoyable is grievously wrong to even think about, and that their only pleasure in life should be grovelling to an invisible friend.

Ensure that they resent anyone who is not like them in every way – skin colour, nationality, political opinion, and especially creed. Make such people out to be evil and vile and give all of those impotent minorities the fictional power to somehow oppress and persecute the vast majority who think exactly like you do.

Teach them to laugh at and dismiss out of hand any faith but their own. Early on (as soon as your child can speak), make sure that they are taught the difference between superstitions: where one raving lunatic in the desert telling the truth about a capricious God who kills people is a sinner, but that another raving lunatic is the desert telling the truth about a benevolent God that kills people is telling the eternal truth.

Instruct them, with all the severity and importance that you can muster, to never ask questions… to never think for themselves… to never live their own lives… to only seek answers from one (just one) particular set of semi-literate Bronze Age folk tales.

Above all else – and this cannot be overemphasized enough – make your child easily identifiable as a True Believer by making sure they cannot spell, use correct grammar, or understand basic English words.

If you do all of the above things, you should be in luck!

The answer was submitted by a mostly anonymous Answers user that goes by the handle of ‘David M’, and I would like to think that the ‘M’ stands for Magnificent.